For the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, the situation toward the end of May 1940 was becoming more and more desperate. There were French protests about the way in which he had withdrawn from Arras, and there were more confused promises about a big new Anglo-French counteroffensive.
John Vereker, 6th Viscount Gort of Limerick, had been a staff officer for most of the First World War. When, in 1917, he took command of 4th Grenadier Guards, he rapidly earned a fighting reputation that has few equals. He won the Distinguished Service Order three times, as well as the Military Cross. In September 1918, guiding tanks into action despite his wounds, he was hit again and continued to command from a stretcher. For this he was awarded the Victoria Cross.
After a spell as commandant of the Staff College, Gort finally got the job of Chief of the Imperial General Staff. This appointment was made over the heads of several senior generals, as was Gort’s subsequent command of the British Expeditionary Force in 1939. Gort was a man with many enemies, and not all of them were German.
On Saturday, 25 May 1940, news reached Gort near Lille that the Germans had captured Calais as well as Boulogne. Reports were arriving at his room in the chateau at Premesques that the Belgian Army was about to capitulate. The Germans had split the Belgian force and left it isolated from the British, who they must have heard had been evacuating men by sea for several days. For Gort, the Belgian capitulation would mean a 20-mile gap opening up on his left flank.
Now came the most important moment in Gort’s career. At about six o’clock in the evening of 25 May, after sitting alone for a long time, he went next door to the office of his chief of staff. General Henry Pownall. Without preliminary discussion, he ordered him to move two British divisions from the south and “send them over to Brookie [General Alan Brooke] on the left.”
There is no doubt that this decision, which went against his orders from the French, and from London, too, had come after much heartsearching. One of the men who knew him, Major General Sir Edward Spears, described Gort as “a simple, straightforward, but not very clever man” and went on to say he was an “overdisciplined soldier who felt above all else that orders must be obeyed.”*
What Gort called a “hunch” had come within an hour of a gap opening in the Belgian front line. Now it would be a matter of waiting to see whether the Germans could race through it before Gort’s two divisions could get there to plug the hole.
For the French, Gort’s decision meant the end of any last hope for a counterattack southward. For the BEF, it meant a chance of a fighting withdrawal. For Gort, it meant the end of his military aspirations—he would never again command an army in the field. Yet if one contemplates what the British government might have been forced by public pressure to do, in coming to terms with a Hitler holding captive a quarter of a million British soldiers, then Gort’s decision was a turning point in the war.
One of Gort’s most vociferous critics was Lieutenant General Alan Brooke, a corps commander. “Brookie” was one of the generals whom Gort had overtaken in his military career. Writing of his chief’s great charm, Brooke felt bound to add that he had no confidence in Gort’s handling of a large force because Gort could not see the wood for the trees. It is an observation difficult to reconcile with Brooke’s suggestion that the BEF should withdraw to the Belgian ports of Ostend and Zeebrugge, which would have proved disastrous when the Belgians capitulated.
Anyone reading the diaries that Brooke published could easily form the impression that the skills, courage, and success of the withdrawal and of the Dunkirk evacuation were solely those of General Brooke. Indeed, Brooke’s own account clearly made a deep impression on the historian Sir Arthur Bryant. In his commentary accompanying Brooke’s record of events as it appears in his book, The Turn of the Tide, Bryant draws the conclusion that the escape of the BEF was due mainly to one man (Brooke) who “by his speed and foresight anticipated the attacker’s every move. . .” While Gort was at his headquarters near the coast, without any means of knowing whether his orders were reaching the battle line, Alan Brooke was “achieving one of the great feats of British military history.”
Closer study of the facts, however, provides material with which to resist this suggestion. Not only was Brooke’s headquarters nearer to the coast than Gort’s, Brooke’s “foresight” was owed largely to a
Major General Sir Edward Spears, Assignment to Catastrophe, vol. I.
Captured briefcase containing the German Order of Battle, and Gort’s communications with the BEF were in good order, as Brooke well knew from his daily visits to him.
It is also worth noting that Brooke’s fully motorized force was facing horse-drawn infantry divisions of Bock’s Army Group B. Brooke did not encounter any of the German armored divisions. It was the limitations of Bock’s transport that frustrated all the German efforts to get through the gap created by the surrendering Belgians before the British divisions got there. There is no doubt that the almost prescient decision of Gort to move the two divisions saved the British Expeditionary Force from destruction.
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